$30 million Goldwater Library coming to Mesa

Official announcement expected today

Downtown Mesa will be home to a library honoring the legacy of late Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater.

Establishment of the Barry and Peggy Goldwater Library and Archives is scheduled to be announced this morning at the Mesa Arts Center.

The $30 million research and education center in the heart of Arizona's third-largest city is expected to contain not only the Goldwater archives but papers from other Arizona politicians.

It will also showcase artifacts from Goldwater's life, his trajectory having paralleled that of Arizona's statehood while deeply influencing national and global politics.

The library's website describes the facility as "a cultural and historical institution of global significance."

The archives are certain to be both voluminous and rich: The late author William F. Buckley reported that after leaving the Senate, Goldwater dictated more than 24,000 letters in a single year.

The library's website calls Goldwater's papers "one of the premier congressional collections in the United States."

Mesa was not the first choice for a library honoring the father of modern American conservatism. The original plan was to find a site in downtown Phoenix, but talks fell through because the city insisted that the Goldwater Library foundation also build two apartment buildings as part of the project.

"We're not in the apartment business," said Judy Eisenhower, executive director of the library foundation who also worked for Goldwater for 311/2 years as his secretary and then chief of staff.

Mesa makes a bid

Eisenhower said Mesa Mayor Scott Smith heard about a year and a half ago that the library was looking for land and invited the board to consider Mesa.

Eisenhower said Mesa's growing list of downtown assets was instrumental in the board's decision to locate there.

This year, four private liberal-arts colleges have announced plans to establish campuses there. Earlier this month, the city nailed down final funding for a light-rail extension through the heart of the city. And Mesa is working with national arts groups to boost the profile of its growing downtown arts-and-cultural district.

Downtown already is home to four museums, including a new wing of the Mesa Historical Museum that is expected to morph into that facility's main campus within a few years.

"Light rail is very important to a project like this, particularly for ASU students," Eisenhower said, while also mentioning the incoming colleges. "Where it's going in downtown Mesa is just perfect for us. ... It's the right thing to do."

Mesa Councilman Chris Glover, who was credited by several sources with helping bring the talks to fruition and now sits on the library foundation's board, called landing the library "a momentous achievement" for Mesa.

It is not a done deal, however. Formal agreements still need to be hashed out between the Goldwater organization and the city, and there remains the big question of money.

Glover said the government of Taiwan has pledged $10 million toward the center. Goldwater championed the cause of the Chinese nationalist government, which fled the mainland in 1949, and Glover said Taiwan is interested in academic-exchange programs with the Goldwater Library.

Smith said the library will be privately funded and operated, with the city's chief role being to provide the land.

The City Council considered the proposal in executive session last week and will have its first public discussion on Thursday morning.

Smith said another catalyst for the library coming to Mesa was the February Republican presidential debate at the Mesa Arts Center, about a block from the prospective library site.

The library, planned to encompass 40,000 square feet, will contain lecture halls and research facilities in addition to museum displays.

"They want to house all of the papers for everybody who has represented Arizona in Washington, D.C., since statehood and even other things pertaining to Arizona history," Glover said.

Last week, however, outgoing Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., said he was donating his historical papers to his alma mater, the University of Arizona.

Political earthquake

The Goldwater Library board has solicited support from a wide variety of political figures, including 1972 Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern, who died this week.

McGovern, quoted on the library's website, said he and Goldwater were friends despite their divergent politics.

"Such an institution can be a focal point for the study, research and discussion of one of the most important figures in 20th-century American history," McGovern said.

That statement speaks to why Goldwater is deemed worthy of the honor of a stand-alone library dedicated to his life, a rarity for a U.S. senator.

The five-term senator was, in sum, a one-man political earthquake who shattered an ideological landscape that had stood for decades.

His victory at the 1964 Republican National Convention wrested control of the party from Eastern country-club types and moved it west. The most notable result of that was the 1980 election of California's Ronald Reagan as president.

Goldwater's opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act helped pull the Deep South into the GOP's orbit after almost a century of Democratic dominance there. Indeed, apart from Arizona, the only states Goldwater carried were in the South, and to this day, Southern "red" states are an integral factor in the presidential-election calculus.

Further, and probably most importantly, Goldwater's powerful articulation of conservative principles moved the entire American political apparatus rightward so forcefully that one analyst has observed that the 1992 Democratic platform was almost identical to the Republican platform of 1968.

On the Republican side, the rightward impulse was so dramatic that, in later years, Goldwater denounced some aspects of it, saying the party had been taken over by "kooks." He reserved special venom for the Religious Right.

Those who analyzed Goldwater's politics over the years, however, said those statements did not spring from a softening of his conservatism, but more from the fact that it was of the libertarian variety: He objected as much to "conservatives" meddling in private lives as to liberals doing so.

That side of Goldwater, by itself, could keep scholars busy for decades.

Deep Arizona roots

But the man was inextricably woven into the fabric of Arizona history, as well. His ancestors were front and center during Arizona's frontier days, one having been present in Tombstone on Oct. 26, 1881, when bullets flew at the O.K. Corral.

Goldwater was born before Arizona became a state. He inherited the reins of a pioneering retail chain and, with his own hands, helped clear the landing strip that became Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport.

He was an early and enthusiastic photographer, radio operator and aviator -- the latter interest leading to a World War II military career that saw him flying equipment and planes to war zones all over the world.

Had he never been anything but a photographer, he would still stand as a legend in that field. Over the years, Arizona Highways published about 300 of his pictures, including one of the most famous Arizona photos ever taken: a 1946 cover shot of two Navajo children herding sheep in a snowy landscape.

None of which is to say anything about his early political life as a corruption-fighting Phoenix city councilman or his 30 years in the U.S. Senate, during which he shaped a major overhaul of the military.

His friends, acquaintances and enemies included a virtual who's who of 20th-century politics, ranging from China's Chiang Kai-shek to Planned Parenthood executive Gloria Feldt to Richard Nixon.

Nixon's Watergate scandal put Goldwater at the center of one of the most dramatic moments in American history. On Aug. 7, 1974, Goldwater went to the White House with U.S. Rep. John Rhodes, R-Ariz., and Sen. Hugh Scott, R-Pa., to tell Nixon that he would be convicted and expelled from office if he were impeached by the U.S. House. Nixon announced his resignation the next night.

Coincidentally, Rhodes' 2003 funeral was at Mesa's First United Methodist Church, just a block east of the prospective Goldwater Library site.